I’m just listening to the playback.
I love you, Caleb.
Again.
I love you, Caleb.
Let the replay run.
Harper’s still asleep when the light goes golden and full, sprawled on her stomach with her hair obscuring half her face, one arm flung out toward me like even unconscious she’s checking to make sure I haven’t disappeared.
I haven’t. Nor do I have any intention of doing so. I’m lying here watching her breathe, which probably qualifies as unsettling to any reasonable person. But I’ve never been entirely reasonable when it comes to Harper. I’ve made my peace with that.
I let her sleep and I think about our son instead, which is still a phrase my brain hasn’t fully processed. It feels so enormous.
Our son.
With every hour I spend with him, the terror recedes a fraction and something else moves in to take its place. There’s such a lightness in my chest it feels like a balloon trying to lift me up off the bed.
Harper wakes up slowly.
Which I know because I’ve been watching the process of shifting light on her skin for about twenty minutes.
It’s warming toward gold now that it’s midmorning—and Harper has been surfacing through it in stages, one small eye twitch at a time.
A deeper breath.
Her fingers curling against the pillow.
The slight furrow between her brows going soft again as whatever dream she was having releases her.
She finally blinks open her eyes and finds me already there, and it’s a moment I love—the exact half-second before she fully orients, when her expression is justopen.Nothing protecting it. Just her face, unguarded, eyes meeting mine.
Then she fully wakes up, and something shifts. Like she ran the calculation in the night and came out somewhere new.
“Hi,” she says, eyes soft.
Fuck. It guts me when she looks at me that way.
“Hi.”
She studies me for a moment. I let her. It’s only fair since I’ve been unabashedly staring at her.
“You’ve been awake for a while,” she says. Not a question.
“Little while.”
“Creep.”
“Little bit,” I don’t disagree.
The corners of her mouth pull. She reaches out and her fingers find the center of my chest—not a reach for me exactly, just a landing. The way a hand comes down somewhere to confirm it’s solid.
Her palm is warm and I feel my heartbeat adjust under it, steady and a little stupid with how happy I am for the touch.
She’s quiet for a moment and so am I. But it’s nothing like the silences we used to have—the ones strung tight with everything unsaid, every rule we were supposed to be following but instead were breaking.
This one has room in it. I don’t feel the need to count anything or fill it or to make it make sense. It justis.